The End of New Kingdom Egypt

The collapse of the New Kingdom marks one of the most profound changes in the five millennia of Egyptian history as it marked the end of an Egyptian empire ruled by native kings. A long history of research on how and why the Egyptian New Kingdom ended revolves around the question of whether this transition was caused by endogenous or exogenous factors, and the role of the processes at the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean. This article reviews the evidence from the Egyptian 19th and 20th Dynasties for the events leading towards the end. A complex scenario is proposed: many factors contributed and each would not have caused the end of the Egyptian political system of the New Kingdom alone. Decisive was the contemporaneity of a wide range of events and failures within the system, amongst which endogenous factors such as dynastic coincidence and internal economic problems met with the breakdown of the international trade system and attacks by foreign enemies such as the Sea Peoples and the Libyans who take over power in Egypt in the Third Intermediate Period.